Sure, there's unknown meat of unknown provenance everywhere ("May be donkey" will be the phrase that defines the decade as surely as "Lunch is for wimps" did the 1980s). Sure, Pope Benedict has become the first pope to resign in half a millennium – leaving the Queen, one hopes, slying polishing her sceptre and muttering with satisfaction: "Popes, presidents, prime ministers – all of them can eat one's everlasting ermine." But for those of us whose dietary and religious affiliations lie elsewhere, there has been even more portentous news. Bibliophiles everywhere blanched and clutched their Jim Craces closer to their chests this week when it emerged that Amazon has cleared a patent enabling it to sell used e-books.

And now you know what it's like to feel your whole brain agog.

The idea is that when you have read your "book"* (on your cold, hard, comfortless but arguably more convenient screen) and don't wish to "keep" **(or, rather, retain access to) it, Amazon will transfer the file from your account to a buyer's, taking – of course – a cut in the process. Thus a market is created, and authors and publishers are quite possibly cut out of it, in one fell swoop. Thus more money drains out of the book business, content dries up and frustrated readers go mad and start roaming towns, destroying everyone and everything in their paths as they search for the country's last open library. The walking unread.

Zombies aside, the most frightening thing about Amazon's latest move is that it reminds us that it's all too late. It is already Amazon's world and we just live in it. Amazon already pretty much owns the print market. Its share price continues to hold up and investment pours in despite risible profit margins, because, unlike almost all other companies in existence, it has created something virtually impossible to replicate. If you're a mobile phone company, you can piggyback on Apple's iSuccess by tinkering with its product and selling the jPhone or AppleBerry for 10% less. But no one's about to set up a global distribution network so they can sell books for pennies less than the boy who got there first.

Oh, and Amazon's also creating its own currency to give to Kindle owners for spending on, um, Kindle content. This patent – whether it's just a preventative measure or results from a genuine desire to create and secure the e-fleamarket – is just a last quick brush of the monolith's doorstep to gather up anything it missed.

As with Amazon, so with the supermarkets, the banks, the utility companies and the modern incarnation of just about every other entity you care to name – they are all now too big to fail (or to succeed, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning "to serve the needs of the people to whom one purportedly caters, and not shareholders"). Less than 10 years ago, I remember laughing at an article in the Onion about the last two companies in the world merging and being renamed Omnicorp Inc. It's going to come to pass before I'm 40. I wonder if I could get Jim Crace to hug me?

* This is my first use of the passive-aggressive apostrophe, and I'm enjoying it very much, so I doubt that it will be the last.